48 JAMES CLERK MAXWELL 



"I have not seen Article 7, but I agree with your dissent 

 from it entirely. On the vested interest principle, I think the 

 men who intended to keep their fellowships by celibacy and 

 ordination, and got them on that footing, should not be 

 allowed to desert the virgin choir or neglect the priestly 

 office, but on those principles should be allowed to live out 

 their day**, provided the whole amount of souls cured annually 

 does not amount to 20 in the King's Hook. Put my doctrine 

 is that the various grades of College otlicers should be set on 

 such a basis that, although chance lecturers might be some- 

 times chosen from among fresh fellows who are going away 

 soon, the reliable assistant tutors, and those that have a plain 

 calling that way, should, after a few years, be elected permanent 

 officers of the College, and be tutors and deans in their time, 

 and seniors also, with leave to marry, or, rather, never pro- 

 hibited or asked any questions on that head, and with leave to 

 retire after so many years' service as seniors. As for the men 

 of the world, we should have a limited term of existence, and 

 that independent of marriage or * parsonage. 1 n 



It was more than twenty years before the scheme 

 outlined in the above letter came to anything ; but, 

 at the time of Maxwell's death in LS79, another 

 Commission was sitting and the plan suggested by 

 Maxwell became the basis of the statutes of nearly 

 all the colleges. 



For the winter session of lS57-5vS he was again 

 at Al>erdeen. 



The Adams Prize had been established in 184$ by 

 some members of St. .John's College, and connected 

 by them with the name of Adams " in testimony of 

 their sense of the honour he had conferred upon his 

 College and the University by having been the first 

 among the mathematicians of Europe to determine 

 from perturbations the unknown place of a disturbing 



